The subject of my paper, namely, the position of Catholics in the social and economic history of Scotland could, I suppose, be dismissed in a sentence. Catholics on the social and economic history of Scotland have no position. I am not aware of anything that has been done on these aspects o f Scottish history by any Catholic in Scotland. Indeed, if we add the other aspects of history to the list—ecclesiastical and political —there is little else to show. In church history we have Bellesheim's four volumes on the history of the Catholic Church in Scotland. And who was Bellesheim ? He was a canon of Cologne Cathedral who became interested in Scottish Catholic church history through his work on the archives at Rome. He brought out his four volumes on the history of the Catholic Church in Scotland in the 'eighties of last century and they were translated with additional notes by D o m Oswald Hunter Blair. But in the preparation of his book Bellesheim did no direct work over here. M u c h of his material was collected by correspondence and therefore, while the volumes are an example of German industry, they lack that intimate touch with the temper of ecclesiastical Scotland essential for the presentation of its Catholic history and to be achieved only by a Catholic reared in its atmosphere. Forty years ago Father William Forbes Leith o f the Society of Jesus edited two volumes of the Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the iyth and 18th Centuries, and twenty years later we had Major M . V . Hay's edition o f The Blairs Papers, 1603-1660, and his brilliant Chain of Error in Scottish History. Apart from Mr. Peter Anson's Catholic Church in Modern Scotland and a very few pamphlets concerning the protagonists of the Counter-Reformation there is not, so far as I know, anything more to put against the vast array of Scottish eccles iastical history as written by Hill Burton, Hume, Lang, Cochran-Patrick, Mathieson, Kinloch, McCrie, Skelton, Muir, Maclean, Duke, Grub, Dowden, Lockhart, Cunningham, Mitchell and Hay Fleming. Even for our knowledge of Bishop Hay, Bishop Geddes and the Catholic vicarsapostolic of the post-Reformation period we are indebted to the Episco palian clergyman, J. F. S. Gordon, who edited in the 'sixties of last cen tury the four volumes of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of Scotland. There may be work in progress, duly noted in the Bulletin of Historical Research, but we have no means of knowing from that periodical when the research student is pursuing his subject from the Catholic point of view. Any attempt to survey the field of Catholic endeavour, arising out of this week-end conference, will o f course remedy that weakness.